Clause 36
Charities Bill [Lords]
4:30 pm
Andrew Turner (Shadow Minister (Charities), Home Affairs; Isle of Wight, Conservative)
This is a series of short amendments to clarify the position of paying trustees. They have special responsibility to safeguard a charity’s assets. I welcome the statement by the noble Lord Bassam in Grand Committee in another place. He confirmed that the Government were
“trying to preserve the essence of the voluntary principle of trusteeship”
and he said that the conditions of payment to a trustee were
“designed to ensure that it is proportionate, protects against conflicts of interest and is in the best interests of the charity.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 16 March 2005; Vol. 670, c. GC515.]
Amendment No. 30 would simply require that any agreement about payment should be made “in advance” of that payment being made or, indeed, the work being undertaken for which the payment might be made. That seems a sensible principle and is, I believe, one of the proposals of the Joint Committee, at paragraph 259.
Amendment No. 31 would exclude charities from employing their own trustees. It is one thing to have a short-term relationship with a trustee who is perhaps doing a little plumbing for the benefit of the charity; it is another thing entirely to have a trustee as a permanent or, indeed, temporary employee of the charity.
Amendments Nos. 32 to 34 deal with unmarried partners or, as I put it, people in a relationship akin to a marriage or civil partnership. There are now many relationships that are not recognised by law, but which will have an influence that might be perceived as inappropriate when it comes to the appointment of people to do jobs, to work for charities and so on. The amendments are designed to deal with that.